Author Archives

Aileen Gallagher
Aileen Gallagher is an associate professor of magazine journalism at Syracuse University's Newhouse School and the Education Editor of MediaShift. She was previously a senior editor at NYMag.com and has written for New York Magazine, Vulture, Slate, Poynter, Bust, and many others.
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Busting Out of Online Poker: Our College Pick

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College campuses are full of ghosts. Alumni magazines have the glossy success stories about the alumnus who made good, but what students remember are the cautionary tales. The tormented writer who worked here for a while. The student who fell to his death from the eighth floor of your dorm. But these stories are almost always more legend than fact. Alexander Deedy’s chronicle of the University of Montana fraternity brother who built an online poker site into a multimillion dollar outfit and then went to jail for it is as much a celebration of the fantasy life of young men as it is a sober warning about the long arm of the law. Deedy’s pacing and sympathy makes his story compelling and his main character relatable.

“Almost Billionaires”

Alexander Deedy | The Montana Kaimin | March 27, 2014 | 15 minutes (3,863 words)

April 9, 2014
Categories: College, Nonfiction
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Reimagining the Student Publication: Our College Pick

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This week’s College Longreads selection is as much for the publication as it is for the story. Richie Siegel’s article about a Japanese street food restaurant in Chicago called Yoshu is mostly a profile of the owners, with a little bit of a restaurant review on the side. Siegel, a sophomore at NYU, is an ambitious writer whose work will mature well. He published the article in a digital magazine he founded called Seersucker, which is produced by and for Millennials. The low barrier to publish is both the beauty and curse of today’s digital tools. But Siegel’s magazine looks and reads with more sophistication because he and his team took the time to think about how the site would work and how the articles should read. We can hope for no less from the next generation of writers and editors.

The Couple Feeding Chicago

Richie Siegel | Seersucker Magazine | March 2014 | 15 minutes (2,722 words)

April 3, 2014
Categories: College, Nonfiction
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Demonstrating in the Cloud: Our College Pick

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Ivory Tower veterans, many of whom were students in the 1960s and 1970s, lament the lack of student activism on college campuses. There are few protests, only a smattering a vigils, and barely any quad chalking. But is all that passion and activism gone, or has it just moved – along with everything else – to the cloud? In their article “Marching On,” Braden McDonald and Molly Simio compare today’s digital activism to the Boomers’ campus strikes, and explore how voices get heard on the social network.

Marching On

Braden McDonald and Molly Simio | The Hoya | March 21, 2014 | 10 minutes (2,416 words)

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March 25, 2014
Categories: College, Nonfiction
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The Creeping Tech Angst in Silicon Valley: Our College Pick

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Yiren Lu, a recent Harvard grad who now studies computer science at Columbia, takes a step back from the startup world to wonder what it means for our tech infrastructure when all the bright young things want to make apps but aren’t skilled in networks and hardware — the stuff that makes the Internet go. And then there’s the culture clash between older (read as: 35+) coders and tech executives who have experience running companies and the younger entrepreneurs who may (or not) be on to the next big thing. In her story, Lu articulates the creeping angst of Silicon Valley: “the vague sense of a frenzied bubble of app-making and an even vaguer dread that what we are making might not be that meaningful.”

Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

Yiren Lu | New York Times Magazine | March 16, 2014 | 28 minutes (6,989 words)

March 12, 2014
Categories: College, Nonfiction, Uncategorized
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The Higher Ed Experience in 2014: Our College Pick

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The college experience for many American students in 2014 is not a residential, Animal House one. Students work and enroll part time to avoid what feels like an inevitable and insurmountable debt load. They may live at home and commute to classes. They get the curriculum, but have to work harder to meet people and be involved with campus activities. That’s an important part of college, too, and one that pays dividends later with resume experience and network building. Brayan Vazquez is a first-year student at Miami Dade College. He is undocumented, and has a 110-mile commute to class twice a week. Increasingly, he is the face of the typical college student in America in 2014. In his profile of Vazquez, reporter Gregory Castillo spent time with the student, his family, and the policy makers who want to extend in-state tuition benefits to undocumented students. How to serve this population is a growing discussion among educators, students, politicians, activists, and tax payers. It’s a well-reported, under-covered story. Like any good piece of journalism, it’s a conversation starter.

Brayan Takes the Train

Gregory Castillo | The Reporter | March 4, 2014 | 9 minutes (2,336 words)

March 6, 2014
Categories: College, Nonfiction
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Two Perspectives on the Duke University Porn Star: Our College Pick

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Young women in college have joked for decades about “working their way through school” via pornography. And as with every tired old joke, there’s some truth behind it. The Duke Chronicle profiled a first-year student named “Lauren,” a woman who identifies as a feminist, libertarian, and porn star as “Aurora.” The student who wrote the piece, Katie Fernelius, opted not to go with a straight profile and instead made the story just as much about her as she did about Laura. The article reads more like an essay, as Fernelius struggles not only with reconciling what Laura does, but also articulating her own reaction. It also critically examines the sexual culture at Duke, which is similar to other schools (Duke just gets more press.). Consequently, the piece at times veers into a reaction paper for Women’s Studies 101. But that’s what college, and college media, gives you: the time to think about the big stuff, and a platform to express it.

Portrait of a Porn Star
Katie Fernelius | The Duke Chronicle | February 14, 2014 | (3,526 words)

 

I’m The Duke University Freshman Porn Star And For The First Time I’m Telling The Story In My Words
Lauren A. | xoJane | February 21, 2014 | (1,701 words)

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Professors and students: Share your favorite stories by tagging them with #college #longreads on Twitter, or email links to aileen@longreads.com.

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February 26, 2014
Categories: College, Nonfiction
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What We Talked About on Campus This Week: A Reading List

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Higher education is a hot topic because it’s so familiar and so easy to criticize. Even if you haven’t gone to college, you get what it’s about. And the complaints – about tuition, about culture, about curriculum – happen on campus, too, and louder. Here are six articles that prompted discussions inside the Ivory Tower this week.

1. Professors, We Need You! (Nicholas Kristof, New York Times, February 16, 2014)

Academics used to be a part of public discourse, and now they’re not. Blame them.

2. Why is Academic Writing So Academic? (Joshua Rothman, The New Yorker, February 21, 2014)

As usual, it’s about audience.

3. USC’s “Business Decision” to Ax Its Master of Professional Writing Program Leaves Unanswered Questions (Gene Maddaus, LA Weekly, February 20, 2014)

Graduate programs can be revenue generators, but not when enrollment goes down.

4. Is Faster Always Better? (Katherine Mangan, The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 17, 2014)

High-school students take accelerated classes for college credit. But once on campus, they can struggle to keep up.

5. The Dark Power of Fraternities (Caitlin Flanagan, The Atlantic, March 2014)

Fraternities thrive at colleges thanks to a culture that markets them and a risk-management system that protects them.

6. Sexual Assault at God’s Harvard (Kiera Feldman, The New Republic, February 17, 2014)

“How do you report sexual assault at a place where authorities seem skeptical that such a thing even exists?”

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February 22, 2014
Categories: College, Reading List
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Not Feeling Carolina: Depression on One of the Nation's Happiest Campuses, Our College Pick

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Mental health issues have lost much of their stigma on college campuses, as they have in the rest of the world. Today’s college students self-medicate just as much as they always did, but they also seek professional help in a much more public way than you might remember from your own school days. You’ll find evidence of this openness in this week’s College Longreads pick, from the University of North Carolina. Every one of Claire McNeill’s sources went on the record about their pain, fear, and suicide attempts. But what makes the story stand out, in addition to thorough reporting, is a thoughtful angle.

The University of North Carolina, the story posits, is a college campus known for its positivity and student satisfaction. “From its radiant azaleas to its basketball fever, from its 700 student organizations to its ranking as Best Public Value School in the nation, from the University’s favored buzzwords — inclusivity, diversity, collaboration — to its unofficial motto in ‘The Carolina Way,’ it seems from a distance that UNC’s 18,500 undergraduate students are living the life of a college brochure,” McNeill writes. How do you live with depression in a place that keeps telling you how happy you ought to be? The angle is what makes an otherwise well-trod story compelling. Journalists rely on this no-duh skill of finding fresh angles so much that they forget it’s something they had to learn, to refine, over time.

Depression in the Southern Part of Heaven

Claire McNeill | Synapse Magazine | February 10, 2014 | 15 minutes (3,807 words)

February 13, 2014
Categories: College, Nonfiction
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How to Do Oral History the Right Way: Remembering the Baltimore Stallions, Our College Pick

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Journalism, like everything else, has its trends. From celebrity guest editors to abundant Upworthian headlines, there’s a lot of replication in our business. So it was with low expectations that I began to read “Baltimore’s Forgotten Champions,” an oral history of a Canadian Football League team by a group of University of Maryland students. Most oral histories are not particularly challenging or innovative – they are, after all, just stitched-together interviews. But this one required some deep reporting to identify, locate, and interview more than 40 sources, including Baltimore Stallions superfans and the team’s former marketing executive. The Capital News Service team went beyond simply interviews and created several interactive graphics to help tell their story in an organic way, not just a tacked-on-for-technology’s sake way. This is the kind of oral history worth repeating.

Baltimore’s Forgotten Champions

Capital News Service | January 24, 2014 | 49 minutes (12,268 words)

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February 5, 2014
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Suspended Justice: The Story of a Wrongful Conviction, Our College Pick

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Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s this week’s pick:

Read more…

January 22, 2014
Categories: College, Nonfiction
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